Category Archives: Survivalism

The latest release of the popular “Far Cry” video game series will feature a Montana setting, and promoted with video shot near Poplar.

A press release from the Montana Department of Commerce says that Far Cry 5 takes place in fictional Hope County, Montana. Although usually set in exotic, foreign locations such as the Himalayas and a fictional African country, Far Cry 5 is the first entry set in America. Its scheduled to be released in February 2018.Since 2004, sales of Far Cry games have reached more than 42 million.

The press release states: Players will have a large game world to explore while fighting off a hostile occupation of the county. In between the action, players will get a taste of Montanas outdoor recreation with hunting and fishing challenges. We know from the film industry that movies can be some of the best tools available for promoting a destination, but the interactive nature of video games represents an exciting opportunity weve never quite had before, said Montana Film Commissioner Allison Whitmer. Audiences around the globe not only will see Montana, theyll experience it virtually.

The official Far Cry 5 website provides this overview: Welcome to Hope County, Montana, land of the free and the brave, but also home to a fanatical doomsday cult known as The Project at Edens Gate that is threatening the community’s freedom. Stand up to the cults leader, Joseph Seed and the Heralds, and spark the fires of resistance that will liberate the besieged community. In this expansive world, your limits and creativity will be tested against the biggest and most ruthless baddest enemy Far Cry has ever seen. Itll be wild and itll get weird, but as long as you keep your wits about you, the residents of Hope County can rest assured knowing youre their beacon of hope.

A spokesperson for Ubisoft said Montana was a natural fit for the series because of its diverse landscape and the do-it-yourself attitude of its people. The developers visited several times to shoot thousands of photos and interview residents.

A location scout identified a church near Poplar where promotional video for the game was shot. The crew employed three people from Montana. Between labor and other expenditures related to the production, the shoot is estimated to have generated $20,000 for the Poplar economy.

While the Montana Department of Commerce is focused on the promotion of Montana, many gaming sites and reviews are focused on the actual premise and game-play.

An article at Kotaku notes:Its about blasting through a section of modern Montana controlled by a Bible-thumping madman who runs a heavily-armed militia. Youre up against The Father, Joseph Seed, who along with his family has spent the last dozen years sinking deep roots into the fictional Hope County while establishing a cult called The Project at Edens Gate.

Sam Machkovech, writing for ArsTechnica, said: “The 13-year-old Far Cry gaming series returns once more in February 2018, and, at least conceptually, this might be its most intense entry yet. While Far Cry games traditionally drop players into exotic, international locales with only a gun and a prayer, this year’s entry, Far Cry 5, lands in the U-S-of-A. Specifically, the open, rural wilds of Montana. Your mission: invade a militarized cult’s massive compound and take down its gun-toting, Jesus-invoking leader.”

From Wired:When it arrives next February,Far Cry 5will unfold in a small town in Montana, where a religious cult tinged with American survivalism has emerged. (Think the Bundys, though no shortage of legalese will doubtless back away from that comparison.) Youll play a young police officer, a man or a woman, depending on your decision, and youll be tasked with (ugh) taking this slice of America back.

The Montana setting and choice of villains in the game has even sparked an online petition, which has garnered nearly 2,000 signatures.

During his presentation on survivalism, Sergio Martinez removed a small Bible in a plastic bag from his duffle bag.

Staying calm is good when youre out there, he said. Like it or not, everyone is going to get religious at some point. Why not have a Bible?

Martinez, an extreme survivalist, gave a presentation to a dozen people at the Stewart C. Meyer Harker Heights Public Library on Saturday morning. He talked about what kind of items to pack away in case of emergency and how to prepare for a disaster situation.

It was toward the end of summer 2005 when Martinez first became aware of disaster preparation. He had family members who lived in Houston that were coming to stay with him during Hurricane Katrina. There wasnt enough food in the pantry, so he decided to head to H-E-B to stock up on some more groceries. When he walked out of the store, the only thing he had was a couple of loaves a bread and some cans of food. Thats when it dawned on him he wasnt nearly enough prepared for survival.

Sometimes you need to trip and fall, and then youre going to learn, he said.

Soon enough, Martinez began teaching himself about survivalism. He read books, talked to experts and watched Youtube videos, and eventually got the chance to compete for a survivalist show that airs on the History Channel.

In front of Martinez, a retired veteran, sat a green bag no bigger than the carry-on a passenger on an airplane would stow in the overhead storage bin. What he kept inside of it was not to be used for a family vacation, though, and a number of the items probably wouldnt be permitted on an airplane.

Martinez recommended preparing meals ready to eat MREs long in advance. His prepackaged MREs included peanut butter crackers, bottles of water, freeze dried food and protein bars. Canned foods including soups and beans are good to pack, too, but in moderation. Too many cans can weigh down a bag, and depending on the situation, you might have to walk for long periods of time. In those situations, any reduction in weight can help.

There were typical items found in Martinezs survival bag, such as an extra pair of clothes, a sleeping bag and a hammock. But there were also nifty tools such as a crank-up flashlight that triples as a cellphone charger and an AM/FM radio. He also pulled out a miniature propane stove and a water filter.

Much like he was prepared for any potential disaster, Martinez was ready to answer questions from the audience. One person asked him about the difficulty of catching your own food through hunting and fishing, and preparing it while in the wild.

Martinez said that with a little practice, it wasnt that difficult.

But dont expect it to taste good, he said.

Once you kill the game, how do you prepare it? We dont have chefs out there.

It Comes At Night follows two families who find themselves reluctantly joining forces amidst an apocalyptic world where a deadly disease is on the loose. The claustrophobia-inducing film takes place mostly in one house for a very tense 97 minutes, in which viewers see the measures the characters take to protect their families.

The stars of It Comes At Night talked to CBS News and shared their thoughts on how ready they would be during an apocalypse and it turned out one of the actors did see his world disintegrate at one point in his life.

Kelvin Harrison Jr. who plays teenage son Travis in the film joked that he would perish, but revealed that he did live through an analogous situation when he was displaced by Hurricane Katrina.

The New Orleans native, who was 12 during Katrina, said, Youre away and you expect your parents to take care of it and you see things happening and its confusing and youre like, OK, I dont really know what this means or if my family is there or my house is there.’

He said that he brought some of that experience to the film: Im trapped in this house [during Katrina] and get to use my imagination and have fun, and thats kind of what Travis does. You cope in other ways.

Harrison said it was only after he finished shooting that he realized he had brought those childhood memories to develop his character.

I was like, Why do I feel so strongly about this? Why is this bothering me this much?’ he said. It felt too real most of the time and then I was like, OK, thats because I lived it.’

He also credited his cast-mate, Carmen Ejogo, with helping him grow as an actor by teaching him how to listen: Dont listen to speak, but to understand, he explained.

Ejogo, who plays wife and mom Sarah in the film, was eager to talk about her survival skills.

I think Id be great super-resourceful, she said. I think Ive been raised with sort of how to make ends meet, figure it out, see things from a left-field perspective Im pretty tough.

Joel Edgerton, who stars as stern and vigilant patriarch Paul, revealed that he would probably rely on Ejogo.

He took an optimistic approach and said, Id really enjoy the dismantling of all technology no emails, no phone and really lean into the experience, but in all truth Id probably just crumble and cry and say, Carmen, what do we do?’

He cracked, Yeah, the apocalypse look, its all the way you view it You think its an apocalypse; Im going to be in the pool.

Both Christopher Abbot and Riley Keough, who play young couple Will and Kim, had very little faith in their abilities to weather an apocalypse though Keough is looking to improve.

Id do horribly, said Keough. Ive actually been wanting to do survivalist courses.

Abbott said his cushy life in a city has taken its toll on his resourcefulness: I feel like Ive been in New York City too long, he said. Id just camp out at the Whole Foods and hope I survive.

Find out which characters actually survive in It Comes At Night, which hits theaters on June 9.

A cache of documents recently unveiled highlight that radicalism and anarchy has been pushed at Evergreen State College since at least 2008.

The documents were exposed by a disgruntled, anonymous Evergreen graduate in a blog post published earlier this month amid upheaval at the public university. The documents consists mainly of Disorientation manuals produced by a campus anarchist group that denounce police, capitalism and banks, and argueshoplifting is a form of survivalism. They also tick off examples of cultural appropriation, such as mohawks, and declare manifestation of white privilege is all around us.

The blogger, listed only under the screen name of Son of Tuck, claims a pervasive element has existed at the campus for years and more recently gained control of it.

The college isnt bad. It just got taken over by a domestic terror cell, writes the blogger, for which contact information is unavailable.The College Fix was made aware of the blog by an anonymous source.

Disorientation guides are not unique to Evergreen. Theyve popped up in the past at Columbia, Amherst, and even Middlebury College, where earlier this springstudents, faculty and outsiders violently protested a conservative guest speakers speech, a melee that left a professor there with a neck injury.

A campus in crisis

The revelation of the Evergreen documents comes amid massive turmoil at the public college in Olympia, Wash.

Last month, students cornered and shouted at biology professor Bret Weinstein over his objection to a Day of Absence event that asked white students and faculty to leave campus for a day. Protesters demanded he be fired. Many faculty called for Weinstein to be punished.

The events have left campus in disarray. Unspecified threats closedthe college for several days. Meanwhile, a group of vigilantes took to patrolling campus with baseball bats.

The current turmoil cannot be directly linked to student anarchists.

However thedisorientation manuals, produced in the past by a student anarchist group known as Sabot Infoshoppe, amount to radical, far-left manifestos that include writings expressing anti-corporatist and anti-police views, the latter of which is a main complaint among protesters today.

Other issues discussed in the manual include white privilege, food justice and what local businesses students should boycott.

A history of radicalism

Recent events at the public university are hardly the first time that left-wing students have stirred controversy on campus. A school known for its progressive reputation, past events show the roots of left-wing activism are embedded in the schools past.

For example, Evergreen was the sight of an anti-police riot in 2008 and played host to an anarchist workshop in 2013. In 2006, some students even protested at the commencement speech of Washingtons liberal governor.

As for disorientation: Mohawks are cultural appropriation. Banks invest in operations that often hurt humans. Shoplifting is a form of survivalism. Those are just a few things stated in the 2013-2014 Disorientation Manual. Itspans 99 pages and includes anonymously written articles touching on issues ranging from protesting tips to discussion of neo-Nazis.

Depending on where youre from, issues such as race priviledges [sic] or food politics may or may not have occured [sic] to you before, the document states. But, be sure, they will come up in seminar. We want to prepare you here with overviews of such inflamatory [sic] ideas to help you begin your process toward a life of thinking more critically and empathetically.

According to theblog post written by the Evergreen graduate, the Disorientation Manual has been an annual tradition for Sabot Infoshoppe. The blogger posted photos showing the 2008-09, 2009-10 and 2010-11 manifestos.

Disorientation Manual 2013 by The College Fix on Scribd

The blogger, who says they graduated from Evergreen in 2012, states I picked up my copy every year at their booth during Orientation week and adds people knew about the DisMan. It unclear how widelythe documents were distributed.

Today, Sabot Infoshoppe is not listed as an official student group on the universitys website and its unknown if a disorientation guide was made for the 2016-17 school year.

Evergreen increasingly radicalized over the years

But I feel compelled to come forward with evidence that the school has allowed student groups (at best) or domestic terrorists (at worse) to indoctrinate freshman into their extremist ideology, the blogger writes.

Son of Tuck posits that recent events on campus, specifically the protest of Weinstein, havent occurred in a vacuum. The blogger argues the school, and the community around it, has had a radical strand for years.

There has been dissent brewing in Olympia (The All-America City86-87) for a long time, and Evergreen has been increasingly radicalized over the years by a small but ever-growing group of what I will call domestic terrorists, the blogger writes.

According to an online flyer for a past Sabot Infoshoppe meeting, the group was described as having a history of radical speaking events, workshops, and movie nights, as well as a former space for books, zines, and dvds.

The groups 2013-2014 booklet describes Evergreen as a school with a progressive student body, but rails on an administration described as too closely tied with corporate interests.

However, underneath this revolutionary reputation lies a hierarchical institution that often resembles the fucked up shit in society that we are considered radical for opposing, it states.

Its guide states manifestation of white privilege is all around us and diversity isnt great at the college. It alleges that examples of white privilege at the school are when white students control discussion during seminars and also include cultural appropriation via hairstyles such as mohawks or dreadlocks.

The manualalso includes anti-police and anti-bank sentiments, telling students that banks are totally fucked. Law enforcement is brought up multiple times throughout the document, with one article alleging police benefit the wealthy.

Sure, there are the random anecdotes of an officer rescuing a cat or catching a burglar. But, in reality, most police officers (and the Olympia Police Department [OPD] is no exception here) spend much of their time harassing poor people and protecting the interests of the rich and powerful, the reading states.

History of activism

The recent events at Evergreen arent the only time radical, left-wing students have held protests on campus. In fact, the school was the sight of a riot in 2008 during a concert held on campus. After a campus police officer took a suspect into custody, the crowd shouted at the officer and then later damaged the officers vehicle. Multiple students were arrested over the incident, according to The Seattle Times.

In 2013, the campus was sight of an anarchist workshop that wasmovedoff campus after an attendee got in a scuffle with a blogger attempting to take pictures of the event.

Liberal students apparently protested at the colleges 2006 commencement over speaker Christine Gregoire, who was then the Democratic governor of Washington. According to the Disorientation Manual, students turned their back to Gregoire as she spoke and held up signs. A banner at the event reportedly read Gov. Gregoire Please Stop Your Racist Welfare Policies.

MORE:I attend Evergreen State College. Its not racist. But it is delusional.

Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter

IMAGE CREDIT: Evergreen College

About the Author

Nathan Rubbelke is a staff reporter for The College Fix with a specialty on investigative and enterprise reporting. He has also held editorial positions at The Commercial Review daily newspaper in Portland, Indiana, as well as atThe Washington Examiner, Red Alert Politics and St. Louis Public Radio.Rubbelke graduated from Saint Louis University, where he majored in political science and sociology.

Good luck with the future, was the last thing Margaret Atwood said to me, after Id shaken her hand and stammered profusely over what an honor it was to talk with her. She didnt mean my personal future; she meant the future of the planet and of the human race, the same future shes imagined so grimly in The Handmaids Tale and in her MaddAddam trilogy. She meant, basically, Good luck not dying because of global warming.

It was an oddly touching sentiment.

For Atwood herself, the future doesnt look too bad. Hulu has announced its plans to develop a second season of its critically acclaimed adaptation of The Handmaids Tale, Atwoods dystopian classic. Netflix recently announced that it would be getting in on the game with an adaptation of Alias Grace, Atwoods 1996 novel of murder and witchcraft. Earlier this year, she won the National Book Critic Circles Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award, and its widely expected shell only rack up more lifetime achievement awards over the next few years.

At New York Citys BookCon last Saturday, I sat down with Atwood to discuss her work, the changing political landscape of North America, and of course the future. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Your work has been getting snapped up into all kinds of prestige TV outlets for the past little while. Why do you think that people are reacting to your work so strongly at this particular moment?

First of all, we have a new platform, which is streamed television series, and that has allowed a lot of complex and longer novels to be adapted for screen that probably would have been harder to do as feature films. That is something that started in the 80s, with British television doing classics, but originally they would just be on television, and you would have to watch them on the night, whereas now you can catch up on things and binge watch and all of the new behaviors that we have seen. That means that a lot of people are interested in making these things. So once upon a time, they would have found it much more difficult to make, for instance, Alias Grace, which is quite complex, into a 90-minute film. As a six-part miniseries, theres a lot more amplitude.

So why are people interested in them right now? In both cases, its people who got very attached to the books when they were 19. And then time passed, and it became possible for them to make these things, which otherwise it wouldnt have been. Sarah Polley made Alias Grace, and she has wanted to do that for 20 years.

As for why people are interested in watching them now, that would be another question. But I think these things go in cycles. So, the first wave womens movement resulted in getting the vote. Then there was a pause while other things happened.

Then the second wave came along at the end of the 60s, partly as a result of the various protest movements that had gone on in the 60s. Their interests were in quite a few things, but included job parity and legal entitlements and property settlements; body image kinds of things; equal pay for work of equal value; a whole cluster of those things.

And then there was another pause. People get burnt out; they get tired; generations succeed each other; people dont want to be their mothers. And then along comes another wave. By that time, the people having done the second wave are their grandmothers rather than their mothers, and thats cooler.

And now we have another wave, which I think kicked off sometime in the late 90s, and gathered steam in recent years, I would say the past five to eight. Lets call it third wave. Third wave has been very energized by the election of Donald Trump, as we saw in the extremely large and widespread Womens March.

It is a coincidence of sorts that these novels are coming along just at this time. Nobody could have predicted this exact kind of thing. But it may explain why the amount of attention has been extreme. It would have been a good show anyway, but it would have been a more hypothetical show. People feel now that its a few steps closer to reality, and a few steps closer than they are comfortable with. So its not just entertainment.

Does it feel to you as though its a few steps closer to reality?

Theres no question. Its going state by state, and part of the interest of the federal government in devolving health care onto states is exactly that. Some states will never do such a thing, and other states will do it in a flash.

Part of the narrative about your work recently has been that you examine power in a very literary way that not many other novelists do. Do you agree with that reading?

A literary way, what does that mean?

This is a different writers take, so Im paraphrasing, but her argument was that the preoccupation of a lot of literary novelists tends to be on an individual, familial level, and that you take the beautiful sentences and the careful character-building and apply it to larger social questions.

Well, we all live in the middle of larger social questions. Everything that goes on is actually affecting us in some way.

One thing I do for my characters is I write down the year of their birth, and then I write the months down the side and the years across the top, and that means that I know exactly how old they are when larger things happen. So, if youre born in 1932, youre born into the Depression. Thats going to have an effect on you. If youre born in 1939, youre born into the Second World War. Particularly if you were born in Canada, as I was, because thats when we went in I was born two months after the Second World War began. My joke is that I would have been taller if it hadnt been for rationing, but thats just my joke.

Everything that you experience as a child is related to when you were born, and that happens to every single human being on the planet. Its different depending on where you are, but for instance, if you were born today in Syria, you are going to be born into a certain set of social conditions, and that is going to have an effect on your entire life: Whats possible for you, what social class youre in, what location youre in, which of the factions you belong to. It cannot help but affect you.

So when we have literary novels that dont do those kinds of things, its because were taking the social milieu for granted. This is normality. The milieu thats being described is the way life is.

But then all of a sudden it isnt. Then all of a sudden it changes. So there are people alive today How old are you?

Im 28.

28. So we subtract from today you were born around 1990.

I was born at the end of 88.

You were born one year before the Berlin Wall went down. So you have no experience of the Cold War. This is what I mean. You dont remember it. So seeing a series like Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, thats ancient history to you. To me, its very contemporary, because I remember it. [Old lady voice] I remember those Cold War days

Handmaids Tale is a what if book, but its a what if a lot of things that have already happened happen again, only in a different place.

Moving back a little bit, I know that one of the first books you published was about survivalism within nature being fundamental to Canadian literature as a field.

Survivalism and my book Survival are two quite different things. I wrote Survival because at that time there was no general understanding of Canadian literature, and most people were told there wasnt any, which wasnt true. Or they were told that there was Canadian literature, but it was just a pale imitation of English literature or American literature. And I didnt think that was true, so my book is about how those three things are different from one another.

I examine that question by taking certain motifs and seeing how they are handled differently in classical American literature, classical English literature, and Canadian literature. And why should they not be different, because the geographical location and the demographic mix are quite different in all three places. That was a 1972 book, the first of its kind.

I wondered if you feel that the idea of I want to put this correctly is it survival within the frontier, per se, or survival within an unforgiving natural world?

Classical Canadian literature is survival within an unforgiving natural world for sure. People get trees falling on them, lost in blizzards, drown in large bodies of water.

And thats definitely something thats really operative in a book like Surfacing. Do you see that as still being present in your work, or have you moved away from that in later years?

One of the arguments in Survival is not that Canadian literature should be that way. Its just that it was that way. But that was in 1972. How many years have since intervened? 45 years. A lot has happened in 45 years, and we can go into what some of those things are, but that would be a whole other college paper. A lot of people have written a lot of books since 1972, and a lot of people have written a lot of different kinds of books.

One of the most noteworthy things that has happened since 1972, which really didnt start happening until the 80s, is that indigenous writers have appeared. In 1972, people wrote about indigenous people, but indigenous people were not telling their own stories, and now they are. That would be a whole other chapter, just for instance.

1972 was about year two of the second-wave womens movement, so the depiction of women has radically changed since that time. Different immigrant groups have come in, and Canadian politics has always been different from American politics anyway, and now its even more different. One of the big issues in 1972 was the Quebec separatist movement, and we dont seem to have that with us much anymore.

So all of those things have changed around. And countries are always changing. The vision the United States had of itself in, say, 1960 is radically different than the vision it has of itself now.

One of the things that has happened in the United States is that the gap between poor people and rich people has become huge, whereas the 50s were a decade of the middle class, in which children expected to do better than their parents and in large part did do better. Thats no longer true.

So, land of opportunity not anymore. Not letting people in, not seeing itself as a world leader anymore, abdicating from its role as world leader. Going back to the 20s, an isolationist time. What happened in 1928? The last time there was a Republican Congress, a Republican Senate, a Republican president. They put in isolation policies and what did that produce? The Great Depression.

One of the repeated tropes across a lot of your books is the presence of a character who functions as a shadow self to the protagonist. In your criticism, youve sometimes read that kind of character as a metaphor for the relationship between the writer as a person and the writer whos doing the writing. How would you apply that reading to, for instance, the character of Zenia in The Robber Bride?

Zenia is the shadow self of all three of the characters, but she functions in a different way for each one, because each one of them is different. But if you know anything about supernatural creatures like that, youll know that they cant come into the house unless you invite them over the threshold.

But novels are often constructed in that way. Not just my novels, but anybodys novels. They have various characters in them. You have to be able to tell one character apart from the other one, so we usually give them different names, different hair colors, they look different from one another. Otherwise you cant tell them apart. Theyre usually counterparts in some way, and that goes for everybodys roles.

Theres a structural principle at work somewhere. Thats just something that has to do with works of art: You have a basic rhythm and then you have syncopation. Its true of music and its true of painting, and its true of anything that involves any sort of pattern.

Youve written in one of your essays on the dystopia that every dystopia contains

a little utopia, and every utopia contains a little dystopia. Its very true.

What do you think are the little utopias hidden within Handmaids Tale and the MaddAddam books?

In the MaddAddam books, the little utopia of course is the Gods Gardeners. In The Handmaids Tale, it is the life before. The flashbacks to the previous life, which of course nobody recognizes as a happy place until its gone.

Its the same in 1984. In 1984, its the paperweight that contains the beautiful little thing, and its the rather unpleasant piece of the forest, the piece of nature that they go to. Its about the only thing that remains, because that 1984 dystopia is so pervasive. Thats us grasping at something better.

In any dystopia, the utopian part is the something better, and in a utopia, the dystopian part is the something worse. It quite frequently has to do with, What are we going to do with those people?

What are we going to say about Brave New World? Well, as it turns out, theres this other part of Brave New World that is unregenerate. The interesting thing about that book is that from the point of view of John the Savage, Brave New World is a dystopia. From the point of the people in that brave new world, the previous arrangement is the dystopia.

Partially, probably, because of the focus on your dystopias, theres been a narrative that youre a somewhat pessimistic writer.

Oh, Im hideously optimistic. I havent killed everybody off at the end. Some people do.

Very true! One of the projects you did a few years ago was the Future Library.

A very optimistic project.

Do you think that there will still be people around, ready and willing to read your book in a hundred years?

The project assumes that there will be; thats why people liked it so much. It assumes that there will be people alive in a hundred years, that they will be interested in reading, that the Future Library in Norway will survive, and that it will all come to fruition as the inventor of it has supposed. That would be Katie Paterson. They just had the third handover in the Norwegian forest. An Icelandic writer called Sjn handed over his manuscript. And who will it be next year? Well soon find out!

The project assumes optimism, but do you agree with its optimistic take on the future?

There is no the future. There is an infinite number of possible futures. Which one will actually become the future? Its going to depend on how we behave now. So its not actually going to be up to me, what sort of future we are going to have. Its going to be much more up to you. Youre going to be around for it, whereas Im actually not.

I would say, should we manage to solve the crisis of the oceans, therefore securing ourselves a supply of oxygen, other problems are solvable. Should we not manage to solve that one, theres no point thinking about any of the others. Womens rights will actually be irrelevant, because there wont be any women, or men either.

Yet, lurking somewhere in the darkness, the fear persists that artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence in an AI arms race as publicly warned by Elon Musk, Dr. Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates.

Lets first look at how technology has played a part in advancing the evolution of human consciousness.

Try to imagine going back to a world without a www in front of it. Even if youre old enough, its difficult.

The 5 a.m. thud of the local newspaper hitting the pavement outside your window;

Reaching for an encyclopedia that hadnt been appended since the current editions printing a decade earlier;

Waiting until 6 p.m. for world news;

Community gossip . . . It was a small, small, world after allbut only in the last half century. Prior, it was much smaller. Access to external stimuli i.e. education, ideas, and information was a lot more precarious.

Additionally, cultural and religious conditioning did a bang-up job of programming you to take your lumps and like em. There was little to no incentive to change the status quo.

You were highly likely to be born, live, and die nearly similarly to the way your parents did.

Innovation, rebellion, and revolution came at a steep price for those who dared buck society and its institutions even from the inside. Things have improvedslightly.

Hence, except for a handful of time-honored geniuses ahead of the curve willing to take the blows for the rest of us, the collective evolution of human consciousness was tedious, cumbersome, and SLOW.

Then came August 6th, 1991. The world wide web became publicly available without fanfare by global media.

English CERN scientist, Tim Berners-Lee, had developed the first web browser computer program in response to his desire to make it easier for scientists around the world to share information, thus ushering in the Information Age.

(It should be noted that before then, an Internet of networked computers existed originating with the U.S. federal government back in the 1960s to link supercomputers in the event one was destroyed in a nuclear blastalso for communications/storagethe data made safe through redundancy.)

Before we fast forward to today, lets establish a simplified definition of consciousness as self-awareness.

In reality, scientists are still attempting to quantify the unquantifiable previously contemplated throughout the last millennia by philosophers such as Plato, Socrates, Thomas Aquinas, Bertrand Russell, Einstein, and many more.

Research is struggling to move beyond theory to answer rudimentary questions such as whether consciousness originates within the brain, or if the brain acts like a receiver that processes non-physical signals.

A Harvard team of researchers think theyve pinpointed the brainstem regions that are the physical source of consciousness. Whether its the origin of consciousness remains unanswered.

Dr. Lucien Hardy from the Perimeter Institute in Ontario, Canada recently proposed a quantum entanglement experiment to determine if consciousness is local or non-local that could even throw previous interpretations of quantum mechanics and free will into question.

What we do know is consciousness is the individuated subjective experience. I (subject) see an (object); therefore, I know I exist.

Theoretical physicist, Dr. Michio Kaku sums up consciousness as, … the process of creating multiple feedback loops to create a model of yourself in space with regard to others, and in time…

In the linked video, Dr. Kaku goes on to state he believes beings embody varying levels of consciousness similar to what Eastern traditions call levels of sentience.

(Interesting Note: Years ago, I met Dr. Kaku at a book signing at Wright State University. I gave him a copy of my book, What Is God? Rolling Back the Veil, explaining sentience and levels.)

Christine Horner

Feedback loop . . . Think back to those old dusty Britannicas sitting in your parents basement. Human consciousness drafted their content that went on to inform human consciousness as a feedback loop.

Consciousness was recognized in 1918 by Nobel Prize winner and one of the founding fathers of Quantum Theory, Max Planck, as fundamental to all aspects of life.

In other words, Planck is stating his yet unproven belief that feedback loops exist within nature. Matter is derived from consciousness recycling back to consciousness.

A modern-day pioneer in the field of unified physics is Nassim Haramein, Director of Research at the Resonance Science Foundation where he leads a team of physicists, mathematicians, and engineers.

Everything emerges and returns to a fundamental field of information that connects us all. Nassim Haramein

Again, information is a form or byproduct of consciousness; consciousness is information.

That all life is inseparable and interdependent will be one of the most important revelations in modern physics.

At this years SXSW Conference in Austin, Texas Ray Kurzweil, Google Director of Engineering and futurist boasting an 86% prediction accuracy rate, forecast: 2029 is the consistent date I have predicted for when an AI will pass a valid Turing test and therefore achieve human levels of intelligence. I have set the date 2045 for the Singularity which is when we will multiply our effective intelligence a billion fold by merging with the intelligence we have created.

(The Turing Test, developed by Alan Turning in 1950, is when machine can exhibit intelligent behavior indistinguishable from human behavior. Technological Singularity is when AI results in exponential runaway superintelligence that would continue to exponentially upgrade itself. Becoming self-aware, it could possibly render humanity obsolete.)

Knowledge is just one byproduct of many feedback loops that run the gamut of five physical senses, or sentience, that makes us human. We might begin to call feedback loops dimensions.

Knowledge by itself becomes a limitation. This is key.

In the same way you look in a mirror and see a living, breathing copy of you, the mirror is only a two-dimensional representation of the you that occupies the 11 dimensions theorized by Dr. Kaku.

Buddhists also recognize a sixth sensethe subjective experience of the mind. Doesnt it reason that the sixth sense also arises as a byproduct (along with knowledge) of the combination of the first five senses? Now were getting into the fractal, multi-dimensional nature of Creation.

Chemical processes in the mind/body feedback loop then create feelings in the body, and so on. If the Universe is indeed unified, then human senses continue beyond six into the sublime and yet undetectable.

Do you see the complex layering of feedback loops/dimensions and processes involved?

Technology/AI are tools that can enhance consciousness, aiding in its evolution, but represent only a fractional part of the whole.

If the question for our times is: when does technology (AI) become self-aware and surpass biology (human beings) in delivering Singularity as a constant, the answer is AI can only mimic a partial experience.

If all life is One, there is no line of demarcation where consciousness begins and where consciousness ends. Consciousness endures, and like the Universe, it expands and evolves.

From another Vanguard 20th century scientist: A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. Albert Einstein

So far, weve mostly explored consciousness and its evolution via external forces from the perspective of separation consciousness.

When you experience yourself as separate from the rest of life, you experience death in the physical world.

What happens when we explore consciousness by tapping into our internal world as taught by the Masters, accessing unseen forces or higher dimensions of consciousness?

What the Masters knew and todays awakening collective mass is realizing comes from a sense (level of consciousness/dimension) no machine will ever experience.

Recognizing the oneness of the Cosmo, your personal experience miraculously transfigures into one where you transcend death for eternal life as extolled by Jesus, Buddha, Krishna, Yogananda, Maharshi, and many others.

Spontaneously evolution is the transmutation of separation consciousness to unity consciousness.

Aided by technology or not, the self-realized human being is a new species

Your brilliant future here now is Singularity as holistic self-awareness in the now moment that you are mind, body, and spirit capable of miracles.

Boundaries removed, you become fearless.

Suffering and hardship end replaced by peaceful, abundant living.

Death conquered, immortality becomes your new reality.

Are you ready to become a Human 2.0? If so, check out my free Your Brilliant Future Here Now Guide, e-books and reading guides, and Your Brilliant Future Here Now blog.

The latest release of the popular “Far Cry” video game series will feature a Montana setting, and promoted with video shot near Poplar.

A press release from the Montana Department of Commerce says that Far Cry 5 takes place in fictional Hope County, Montana. Although usually set in exotic, foreign locations such as the Himalayas and a fictional African country, Far Cry 5 is the first entry set in America. Its scheduled to be released in February 2018.Since 2004, sales of Far Cry games have reached more than 42 million.

The press release states:Players will have a large game world to explore while fighting off a hostile occupation of the county. In between the action, players will get a taste of Montanas outdoor recreation with hunting and fishing challenges. We know from the film industry that movies can be some of the best tools available for promoting a destination, but the interactive nature of video games represents an exciting opportunity weve never quite had before, said Montana Film Commissioner Allison Whitmer. Audiences around the globe not only will see Montana, theyll experience it virtually.

The officialFar Cry 5 websiteprovides this overview:Welcome to Hope County, Montana, land of the free and the brave, but also home to a fanatical doomsday cult known as The Project at Edens Gate that is threatening the community’s freedom. Stand up to the cults leader, Joseph Seed and the Heralds, and spark the fires of resistance that will liberate the besieged community. In this expansive world, your limits and creativity will be tested against the biggest and most ruthless baddest enemy Far Cry has ever seen. Itll be wild and itll get weird, but as long as you keep your wits about you, the residents of Hope County can rest assured knowing youre their beacon of hope.

A spokesperson for Ubisoft said Montana was a natural fit for the series because of its diverse landscape and the do-it-yourself attitude of its people. The developers visited several times to shoot thousands of photos and interview residents.

A location scout identified a church near Poplar where promotional video for the game was shot. The crew employed three people from Montana. Between labor and other expenditures related to the production, the shoot is estimated to have generated $20,000 for the Poplar economy.

While the Montana Department of Commerce is focused on the promotion of Montana, many gaming sites and reviews are focused on the actual premise and game-play.

An article atKotakunotes:Its about blasting through a section of modern Montana controlled by a Bible-thumping madman who runs a heavily-armed militia. Youre up against The Father, Joseph Seed, who along with his family has spent the last dozen years sinking deep roots into the fictional Hope County while establishing a cult called The Project at Edens Gate.

Sam Machkovech, writing forArsTechnica, said:”The 13-year-old Far Cry gaming series returns once more in February 2018, and, at least conceptually, this might be its most intense entry yet. While Far Cry games traditionally drop players into exotic, international locales with only a gun and a prayer, this year’s entry, Far Cry 5, lands in the U-S-of-A. Specifically, the open, rural wilds of Montana. Your mission: invade a militarized cult’s massive compound and take down its gun-toting, Jesus-invoking leader.”

FromWired:When it arrives next February,Far Cry 5will unfold in a small town in Montana, where a religious cult tinged with American survivalism has emerged. (Think the Bundys, though no shortage of legalese will doubtless back away from that comparison.) Youll play a young police officer, a man or a woman, depending on your decision, and youll be tasked with (ugh) taking this slice of America back.

The Montana setting and choice of villains in the game has even sparked anonline petition, which has garnered nearly 2,000 signatures.

HARKER HEIGHTS In front of retired veteran Sergio Martinez sat a green bag no bigger than the carry-on a passenger on an airplane would stow in the overhead storage bin. What he kept inside of it was not to be used for a family vacation though, and a number of the items probably wouldnt be permitted on an airplane.

Martinez, an extreme survivalist, gave a presentation to a dozen people at the Stewart C. Meyer Harker Heights Public Library on Saturday morning. He talked about what kind of items to pack away in case of emergency, and how to prepare for a disaster situation.

It was toward the end of summer 2005 when Martinez first became aware of disaster preparation. He had family members who lived in Houston that were coming to stay with him during Hurricane Katrina. There wasnt enough food in the pantry, so he decided to head to H-E-B to stock up on some more groceries. When he walked out of the store, the only thing he had was a couple of loaves a bread and some cans of food. Thats when it dawned on him he wasnt nearly enough prepared for survival.

Sometimes you need to trip and fall, and then youre going to learn, he said.

Soon enough, Martinez began teaching himself about survivalism. He read books, talked to experts and watched Youtube videos, and eventually got the chance to compete for a survivalist show that airs on the History Channel.

Martinez recommended preparing meals ready to eat MREs long in advance. His prepackaged MREs included peanut butter crackers, bottles of water, freeze dried food and protein bars. Canned foods including soups and beans are good to pack, too, but in moderation. Too many cans can weigh down a bag, and depending on the situation, you might have to walk for long periods of time. In those situations, any reduction in weight can help.

There were typical items found in Martinezs survival bag, such as an extra pair of clothes, a sleeping bag and a hammock. But there were also nifty tools such as a crank-up flashlight that triples as a cellphone charger and an AM/FM radio. He also pulled out a miniature propane stove and a water filter. At one point, he removed a Bible in a plastic bag.

Staying calm is good when youre out there, he said. Like it or not, everyone is going to get religious at some point. Why not have a Bible?

Much like he was prepared for any potential disaster, Martinez was ready to answer questions from the audience. One person asked him about the difficulty of catching your own food through hunting and fishing, and preparing it while in the wild.

Martinez said that with a little practice, it wasnt that difficult.

But dont expect it to taste good, he said. Once you kill the game, how do you prepare it? We dont have chefs out there.

Who knew so many organically-grown apple trees shouldered the Yellow Brick Road?

Camping, more than often, can be an exploration in the mundane minutiae of survivalism. We pitch tents in order to shelter ourselves from Mother Nature’s elemental fury; bonfires are lit to keep our core temperatures in a homeostatic balance. Water canteens, mulishly straddled to our waistlines, batter and bruise our hips with each pressing hike. Needless to say, such existential odysseys aren’t exactly everyone’s cup of Early Grey tea. That’s, however, when the wonderful witches and wizards of Oz Farm come into frame to help us experience the softer, gentler edges of the great outdoors

One-hundred-thirty miles north of the Presidio in Mendocino County, Oz Farma 240-acre span of redwood forests, snaked through by the Garcia Riveraims to enchant all those who stay within its eco-chic confines. Completely off the grid, Oz Farm is self-sustained entirely by a network of solar panels and a single Bergey wind generator. (You won’t find a PG&E electrical line for miles.)

Working in tandem with one another, they not only light up each of Oz Farm’s nine rentable structures, they also provide the necessary amount of water to maintain the 72-acres of organically grown crops that sprout up from the heart of the property. From Pink Pearls to White Winter Pearmains, some 14 different varieties of trellis-grown apples are cultivated here; the farm is also well known for pressing some of the best all-natural apple juice anywhere in the state.

Above all other recreational endeavors, Oz Farm is a place where aspiring agriculturists can get their hands dirty andin a very literal and metaphorical senseplant the fruit-bearing seeds for their future ambitions as sustainable farmers. Through apprenticeship programs, Oz Farm aims to educate and provide the intellectual capital and real-life experience necessary to create the next generation of sustainable farmers.

Regardless if you want to hone your green thumb or just want to spend a weekend under the trees, Oz Farm will take you back to your minimalistic, pre-smartphone roots. All you have to do is follow the 65 MPH Yellow Brick Road (the 101) up there to get out of Dodge for a bit.

Reserve your next foray into the Wonderful World of Oz, courtesy of Hipcamp.

Location: 41601 Mountain View Rd. (Manchester)

Bedrooms: 9 rentable cabins, with a community house located at the front of the property; cooking supplies, hot tubs, and killer views are all included.

Bathrooms: 9-plus bathrooms; hot showers can be taken at the main community house.

Extras: Fresh produce as far as the eye can see, friendly staff to help you navigate all the farm’s hidden treasures, bonfire pits, and serene hiking trails! Also, Oz Farm may just be the perfect place to have your future wedding…just saying.

Emerald City’s never looked more green or eco-friendly.

(Photo courtesy of Hipcamp)

Books don’t need batteries to enjoy.

(Photo courtesy of Hipcamp)

Outdoor patio vibes for day on end.

(Photo courtesy of Hipcamp)

Livin’ the lush life.

(Photo courtesy of Hipcamp)

Who needs spring board when you’ve can just lay your mattress on a bed of mulch?

Last weeksannouncement of Far Cry 5 wasnt itself a surprise. Over the past 13 years, the series has evolved from a playground of first-person shooter mayhem to something far more distinctive: A collection of deep, difficult, often politicalgames that served as meditations on violence as much as enactments of violence itself. Theyve gone froma tropical island to an African warzone,toaneven more dangerous tropical island, to an imaginary version of Tibetand in doing so, have sold more than 20 million copies, making a new installment a formality. What is a surprise is the new games focus. While the series has long concerned itself with terror and instability, now its planning to do so with a homegrown brand of extremism.

When it arrives next February, Far Cry 5 will unfold in a small town in Montana, where a religious cult tinged with American survivalism has emerged. (Think the Bundys, though no shortage of legalese will doubtless back away from that comparison.) Youll play a young police officer, a man or a woman, depending on your decision, and youll be tasked with (ugh) taking this slice of America back.

Thats a promising premisebut if the past is any indication, Far Cry is going to blow it.

From its first game, the Far Cry series has been thick with action and lifethe wildlife hunts, your enemies have their own concerns,and combat starts raging fires that transform the space around you. But more interestingly, the franchise lingers in that instability: its earnestly interested in violence and colonialism as forces in the world, and is at least moderately aware of its own complicity in those forces. Its villains are arms dealers and conquerors, and you are a destroyer pitted against destroyers.

That mission, coupled with an insistence on far-flung locales and societies, has produced mixed results. Far Cry 2 was the best title of the bunch, but it couldnt shake an Orientialist attitude toward its African setting. The later games leaned into the fun factor, which made their critiques feel absurdly half-hearted. It has been, at times, a contradictory disaster of a franchise.

Now, instead of exoticizing a foreign nation for a Western audience, the franchise going right to the heartland. This is Far Cry at its most deliberately provocativethe closest its gotten to touching on issues it might actually have something worth saying about. It touches on the slow rise of reactionary conservativism in the United States, along with the survivalist and prepper cultures that have been growing in the margins since at least the 1990s. Combine that with the choice to have you play as a police officer in a small American town, and youre looking at a premise thats already incredibly politicized from the mainstream American perspective.Yet, the series history shows no indication that its writers or developers know how to handle the games political overtones, no matter how earnestly they engage with them.

But, to be honest with you, I dont really care. Thats the thing about Far Cry:Even at its messiest, its always remained interesting. The games attempt ambitious things, and when they fail, theres something fascinating about the way the pieces fall apart. In the gaps of design logic and bad writing, you can see illuminating frictions. You can learn things about the way colonialism works and doesntnot from the games themselves, but by watching how each subsequentgame fails torespond to the criticisms levied at its predecessor. Theres magic in the dashed ambitions of high-budget productions; you can practically see the incompatible ideas spattered on the walls like giant inkblots.

Far Cry 5, when it launches, probably wont be goodat least in the sense of being a coherent game that executives its best ideas competently, let alone doing justice to its subject matter. But it will be fun, and it will interesting.Montanas got a big, big skytheres room for all kinds of stuff under there.